Violence silencieuse - Sous le regard de Roméo Mivekannin

How to view colonial exhibitions without reproducing their violence? Roméo Mivekannin turns the lens back onto the visitor themselves, in a work that mirrors the history of human zoos and their images. Born in 1986 in Bouaké and a descendant of the Benin king Béhanzin, Roméo Mivekannin develops a body of work that revisits European representations of Black models in painting and photography. Known for his draped paintings that blend acrylic and mud elixir, he inserts himself, through self-portraiture, into historical scenes to question their construction and their stakes. The artist critically analyzes the ethnographic exhibitions of the 19th and 20th centuries, in which non-European people were presented as objects of curiosity. He highlights the persistence of these legacies in museums, as well as the silent violence of the photographs produced in Paris at that time. For the exhibition, Mivekannin creates four metal sculptures in the shape of closed aviaries, representing the Musée d’Ethnographie du Trocadéro, the western wing of the Palais de Chaillot, the Musée de la Porte Dorée, and the Musée du quai Branly – Jacques Chirac. Made in collaboration with Ivorian blacksmiths in Abidjan, these aviaries embody a symbolic enclosure. He also presents fourteen large canvases inspired by photographs from the museum’s collection: the first revisits a presentation in full regalia at the Trocadéro; the following reinterpretations of exhibitions that took place at the Champ de Mars, the Jardin d’Acclimatation, or the Folies Bergère. The original photographs will be visible through a glass panel with no tint, inviting the visitor to witness their own position as a viewer. With the support of the Marc Ladreit de Lacharrière Foundation.